Guide to Family Systems & Family Therapy – What You Need to Know

One great thing about family systems theory is that it understands how important the surrounding situation is. This is crucial for cross-cultural therapists who work with diverse clients with different backgrounds. The idea is that the family plays a big role in shaping who we are, and when you combine all the parts of a family, it becomes more significant than each individual part.

According to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model, our families are like ecosystems that evolve together. This model helps us understand how different things in our environment affect our development. There are four main systems in this model:

1. Microsystem – Our immediate surroundings like home, school, religious institutions, neighborhood, and peer groups.
2. Mesosystem – How these systems interact with each other (for example, how parents interact with the school).
3. Exosystem – External influences that don’t directly impact us, like mass media, parents’ workplace, local government, school board, and local industry.
4. Macrosystem – The bigger picture, including dominant beliefs, ideologies, history, and political periods (like growing up during the internet age or experiencing events like 9/11).

Family systems therapy is different from individual therapy because it doesn’t only focus on the mind or subconscious when trying to understand people.

This way of looking at families is different because it sees them as systems. Western systems theory, created before and during World War II, has been part of science for about 60-70 years. Originally meant for military intelligence, it was later used to understand various aspects of our lives. When applied to social structures, it changed how we see families, the people in them, and the complex systems influencing them.

Gregory Bateson, a key figure in starting family therapy, began this work in Palo Alto, California, in 1952. Along with researchers like Jay Haley, they explored schizophrenia in the context of family dynamics. While they didn’t completely treat schizophrenia, they identified what family therapists believe is the issue: it’s not the individuals but the family’s structure that needs attention for members to live together happily. For example, parents in conflict may cause a child to act out. Instead of addressing their own issues, parents might focus on the child, blaming them. This pattern, called “scapegoating,” is crucial in family analysis. The Bateson group believed that the solution wasn’t just fixing the child’s behavior but addressing the family system’s dysfunction. Once these issues were resolved, the parents’ conflict would improve, and the child’s challenging behavior would decrease.

This idea gave rise to family therapy, which involves different approaches when working with individuals, couples, and families:

1. Bowenian Family Therapy: This approach, based on Murray Bowen’s work, focuses on family issues spanning generations. It emphasizes individuality within the family and uses a genogram to identify family structures.
2. Structural Family Therapy: Initiated by Salvador Minuchin, this method emphasizes family structure defined by rules and roles. It suggests that addressing dysfunction involves changing these rules and roles. Family functionality and dysfunction are viewed in terms of coalitions, alliances, and hierarchies.
3. Narrative Therapy: Developed by Michael White and David Epston, it prioritizes the client-therapist relationship over problem diagnosis. In family therapy, the therapist and client work together to identify and rewrite the client’s life story, removing the problem. It is useful for addressing various challenges like depression and addiction in families.
4. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT): Created by Sue Johnson, this therapy is rooted in attachment theory, focusing on relationship patterns, communication, and building new emotional bonds.

Addressing the family system and its dysfunction is crucial in solving problems. By successfully dealing with these issues, the problematic behavior of parents can be healed, leading to a decrease in oppositional behavior from the child.

Family therapy aims to solve individual problems by addressing the structure of family systems. The idea is that by healing the family as a whole, many of the issues faced by individual family members can be resolved. It’s essential to recognize that our social connections, whether in our neighborhood, religious institutions, schools, or other groups, can impact the physical structure and development of our brains. This influence can result in either integrated or disintegrated mental states. As feelings of isolation and mental health issues increase, deliberately connecting with our community becomes crucial. For BIPOC and LGBTQI individuals, a sense of community acts as a protective factor against mental health issues.

Creating a community doesn’t require befriending everyone or filling every weekend with social activities. It starts with small, intentional acts of kindness and acknowledgment.